We have improved our Views feature to include a simple toggle that lets you filter the entire View to show just those items that are assigned to you.

This new toggle appears on the top-right corner of the View, and we have added a Tip to help you understand the function:

What Needs Attention without filtering

Clicking on the toggle will immediately shrink the View to show just those items that are assigned to you:

What’s Due with filtering

All the other items are hidden from the View, and a simple count at the bottom of each column shows you how many items are assigned to others. In the example shown above, 1 item is assigned to someone else, and is due today.

It’s a simple, fast feature that we think shows the best of Kerika’s design approach 🙂

We have offered free accounts to small nonprofits and schools/universities from the very beginning of Kerika’s existence, but this was always on an ad hoc basis: someone would occasionally ask us for a free account for their school or nonprofit team, and we would agree.

Looking back, we found that we agreed to almost 99% of all the requests that ever came to us: the only situations where we turned someone down were

When we couldn’t figure out what the nonprofit was doing, or even whether it really existed. (Having a domain for your school/nonprofit really helps, even if it is not in English.)

When the school was for-profit, (We dodn’t see why we should subsidize for-profit organizations.)

When the organization was essentially a governmental entity that was getting funded through public money in a normal way.

With these caveats aside, we have tried to be very generous and helpful for small organizations that are doing philanthropic work, or are schools.

But our old process for dealing with these requests was really haphazard, and when we implemented our new billing system and improved account management features, we also made it easier for us to grant nonprofit status to a much larger group of organizations, providing they are small teams.

Our new process makes everything much easier for schools and nonprofits: we are whitelisting entire domainsso that everyone from that domain who signs up automatically gets a free Academic & Nonprofit Account.

This means that only person ever needs to make a request on behalf of a school or university: if that gets approved, we will approve it for everyone from that school/university.

With a free Academic/Nonprofit Account you can have up to 10 people working on boards owned by that account: it doesn’t matter how many boards you have, or how big these boards are.

If you need more than 10 people, you will need to sign up for a Professional Account, which is $7 per user, per month (normally billed annually, as $84 per user).

Here’s a partial list of schools and universities we have already whitelisted for free service:

We have made a small usability tweak/improvement to handle the (rare!) situation where you are part of someone’s Account, but for some reason the Account Owner is no longer sharing any boards with you.

A new feature that should help our customers better manage their account teams, particularly in large organizations: the Account Owner can export (in Excel format) a complete list of everyone working on any boards owned by that account.

This feature can be found in the Manage Users tab of your Account page:

Exporting Account Team Members

The exported data also includes the IP address last used by an account team member: this can help IT departments review their security periodically, or investigate any concerns they may have about misuse.

With the implementation of our shiny, new and fully automated billing system, it’s become a little more important for our customers to make sure that all the users within their organization are working in the right accounts — preferably, a single account.

Working in a single account, rather than a bunch of separate accounts, has advantages:

It makes it much easier to pay for subscriptions: if all the Kerika users within a department are working on boards owned by a single account, then only that account needs to purchase subscriptions. This means less invoicing and payment stuff for you to worry about.

It also ensures that all project assets — boards, documents, canvases, etc. — are owned by a single entity. And ideally this single entity would be a service account rather than an individual. Many of our customers are using service accounts, set up using emails like kerika@example.com.

We have done a ton of improvements to the new user sign-up process to help guide people to working with their coworkers, using accounts that the coworkers have already set up, instead of creating new accounts.

But, there are still situations where an organization may find that, across all of its Kerika users, there are too many different accounts. If this is the case for you, we can help: we can consolidate multiple accounts into a single account if you ask us.

This consolidation preserves all the existing boards, content, and project teams: it just changes the ownership of everything to be a single user ID.

The rollout of our new billing system seems to have been smooth — so far, fingers crossed! — and with this you now get better controls over who is part of your Account Team:

Manage Users

Please note that you don’t get charged for Visitors: if someone is only a Visitor on your boards — i.e. is not a Team Member or Board Admin on any board you own — you don’t need to pay for this person.

It doesn’t matter how many boards this person “visits”.

Visitors do show up on your Manage My Team list in the Manage Users tab, so you are reminded that they have access to some, possibly all, of your boards, and you can remove a Visitor entirely from your Account in the same way that you might remove a Team Member or Board Admin.

As part of our next release, which will include a new billing system, we will make it easier for you to move boards that you own to another account.

This can help in several scenarios:

If someone is leaving a team, it’s good practice to have their boards transferred to someone who will remain, so that ownership of project assets — the boards and all the content in the boards, including documents — remains with the team.

More importantly, it is good practice to stay away from having individuals own boards, and instead use service accounts to be the single Account Owner in your organization.

A service account is an omnibus account, typically set up with an email address like kerika@example.org, that isn’t associated with a single individual. A service account will never quit, never get fired, or take a vacation because a service account is not a real person — it is simply an account/ID used to be the permanent, omnipresent, owner of project assets so that team turnover doesn’t disrupt anyone.

If you own a board, you can move it to another account, i.e. effective change its ownership, by selecting the board on your Account’s Home, and clicking on the Board Actions button which appears on the top-right corner of the board card:

Board Actions Menu

This will bring up a small menu of actions that are available to us as the board’s current owner:

Board Actions

(Note: this menu can also be accessed using the right mouse button.)

When you select the Move to another Account action from this menu, we will present you with this new dialog box:

Move Board dialog

A list of “known collaborators” is presented to you by Kerika to make it easy to select a coworker with a single mouse click, but you can also move the board to someone else, who isn’t part of your current Kerika collaboration network.

If you type in an email address, Kerika will immediately check to see whether this email address is that of a known Kerika user, before letting you proceed further:

Checking if new owner is a Kerika user

We think these improvements will make it easier for our users to manage their organizations boards, and move towards consolidated ownership for easier asset management.

Certain characters are not allowed in file names, e.g. “/”. We noticed people were running into this problem, most probably because they were hitting the wrong keys inadvertently when renaming files.

Kerika is going to take of this silently from now on: if you try to rename a file using a character like “/” that Box can’t handle, Kerika will silently ignore that character in your renaming action.

File names can’t be more than 260 bytes. For people using English and similar languages, this generally means a file name cannot be more than 260 characters (with each character requiring one byte of storage). But for most Asian languages, e.g. Thai or Japanese, one character may require two bytes of storage, because the size of the alphabet is much larger than the Roman alphabet used by English.

This means that in some languages, file names may have to be much shorter, depending upon how many bytes are needed for storing each character, which in turn depends upon the size of their alphabets.

Some folks from Thailand were running into this problem: Kerika will start detecting this better, and provide more useful error messages